Potshot

Rating:
Summary: Wild West Spenser
Review: I don't know why I do it, but when I see a new Parker on the shelf I decide to give him another chance. This is more of the same old stuff,get a client,listen to their story,take the case ,schmooze with Susan,pet the dog,cook a meal or two,go to Cimoli's gym,find Hawk,same wisecracks back and forth.
Now the middle of the book,someone threatens Spenser,he retaliates,meets with local law enforcement,gets warned to stay off the case,calls Susan for advice and encouragement,and goes back to "sticking his nose where it don't belong" untill someone reacts.
Now it's time to bring in Hawk and whoever else he needs for backup and expose the killer and head back to Boston to Susan and the Mutt. Yawnnnnn ! enough of this drivel, I'll just leave it on the shelf!

Rating:
Summary: Why Do I Do It?
Review: Why do I do it? Why do I keep reding Spenser novels long after they have become moribund? I think there are three reasons. First, they are an easy read and have big print. Second, they are really nothing more than sophisticated comic books with an overlay of simple-minded, Papa-Hemingway pseuo-ethics, manly bravado, and goofy puppy love. This appeals to the male adolescent in me. Third, they are pretty good as shoot-em-up westerns. Every one of them is a western, not just Potshot. My credibility, however, is being stretched tighter than rawhide in rain. Hey, Spenser fought Ezzard Charles and was in the Korean War. He has to be at least 70. But, women still think he's a macho hunk. He can still put down burly bikers and run through the desert with his gun held steady. Susan Silverman, who must be a gorgeous 65 by now, still wants to ball his brains out. All of this is a bit much. Potshot is evidently his "homage" to The Dirty Dozen, Magnificent Seven, etc., and he neatly assembles a rainbow coalition of thugs (an African-American, a Mexican, a Native American, a gay, a short person, and a mafia soldier). How nice -- especially since they can all sit around and take witty ethnic, racial, and gender potshots at one another without a single misunderstanding. These thugs surely are sophisticated. When all is said and done, the reader is left wondering why the Widow Woman hired Spenser. How could she know that he could gather his wild bunch to chase out the the Dell gang? Did the LA cop, who hardly knew her, assure her that Spenser-for-hire could in turn hire an army? After this tepid book, it seems time for Spenser to fold his teepee and silently steal away into the golden sunset. Hey, Spenser, there are plenty of nice retirement communities right around Tucson.

Rating:
Summary: A fine bit of Potshooting
Review: This is my first Spenser novel, coming highly recommended by my roommate who reads them all the time. I remember watching Robert Urich in "Spenser: For Hire" when I was a child and always enjoyed it. I never knew it was a book series as well. Parker has a great writing style, and this book I thought was pretty awesome. The one missing star was for the lack of a fairytale ending, but as my roommate told me, this is the real world, and the bad guy doesn't always wear black. Parker's writing is intelligent, funny, and realistic, and most importantly, he tells a good story. I can't wait to read another one! By the way, my roommate recommends 'Ceremony', and 'The Widening Gyre', and the one about Rachel, but I can't remember the title. "Rachel" is in the title.

Rating:
Summary: The Gang That Could Shoot Straight
Review: Ever since his near-fatal encounter with Ruger,I imagine Spenser to be pushing into his mid-fifties. Takea look at the photoon the back cover. That's Parker, and that's what Spenser looks like, not like Robert Urich. CHECKOUT THE PHOTO. The love of dogs. The love of baseball, especially the Red Sox. The sneakers. The thug jacket, shades and black glove. Notice that Parker and the dog are at the bottom of an ascending staircase. Where they are, it's dark, but Parker/Spenser is LOOKING INTO THE LIGHT, or conversely, the lights shines ON him. He neither flinches into the light near resists it, he seems to be COMMUNING with it. Then read chapter 34 of "Potshot." It'll tell you everything you ever need to know about life, the Universe and everything.

Rating:
Summary: Robert Parker does Hammett/Kurosawa
Review: I used to snap up Parker's novels as they came out until about the mid to late eighties when it seemed they were 250+ pages of wisecracks hung on a miniscule plot. Matter of fact I hadn't read his last 4 or 5 at all. But I'm a sucker for the old "town terrorized by corrupt forces" trick-Red Harvest, Seven Samurai, Magnificent Seven-love em all. So I had to grab the new Spenser and I was not disappointed. Granted I didn't know some of Spenser's sidekicks having skipped a few, but I was quickly brought up to speed. This is an excellent example of the genre and deserves a place among the classics of its kind. You quickly realize this book is a tribute to, rather than a copy of the above classics. And danged if Spenser doesn't run into an actual mystery for a change. I guess I have to catch up now. Welcome back to my shelf, Mr Parker.

Rating:
Summary: THERE'S GOOD NEWS & BAD NEWS AS SPENSER RIDES AGAIN!
Review: Watch out, fellow Spenser fans--here comes Robert B. Parker with a Spenserized version of "The Magnificent Seven"! That's right, an Old West showdown with our hero and his band of intrepid mercenaries--a rogue's gallery of inimitable sidekicks from past books--versus a large gang of marauding mavericks organized under an intense scarecrow of a leader known only as The Preacher. No, the outcome is never ever in doubt, but that's not why we read Spenser's adventures, is it?

Here's the caper: Our hero is hired by Mary Lou Buckman, a "comely" (as it turns out, a perfectly choice adjective by an anonymous dust jacket writer!) widow from Potshot, an out-of-the-way Old West town reclaimed and re-settled by monied refugees from life in the big city. Mary Lou wants Spenser to pin down her husband's murder on The Preacher and his motley gang of thugs, collectively known as The Dell, who regularly emerge from their hideout in the hills above to terrorize Potshot. Local law enforcement seems unable or unwilling to do anything about the murder or the gang.

Naturally, Spenser starts to stir things up. Before long, he's sufficiently impressed Potshot's leaders, who also want to hire him to clean out The Dell. For that, he needs reinforcements: from Boston, old ally and henchman, Hawk, and the quick-draw, dead-eye gunsel Vinnie Morris; Tedy Sapp, the bodybuilding gay bar owner from Georgia; Bernard J. Fortunato, the diminutive tough guy from Las Vegas; and Los Angeles mobster Vincent del Rio's ace soldiers, Chollo and Bobby Horse.

As ever, Spenser is confronted by the fact that things aren't what they seem. The crooked may be telling the truth; "the innocent" have self-serving, double-dealing motives and dubious backgrounds to hide.

Face-offs pile up into a bloody climax as Spenser makes the connections among the players and does the job he's never really hired to do--find the truth--which turns out to be a conclusion that's not so far from the surface after all. The ending is a twist, though not really a surprise, that's reminiscent of James M. Cain's DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Enough said.

As always, Parker provides you with a page turner, a straight-through read. You want a beach book? Entertainment with "no heavy lifting"? Here it is! That's the good news. However, as a longtime fan--I've read'em all!--I've got to deliver the crooked with the straight: POTSHOT is not a top-flight Spenser.

I can live with Parker's tongue-in-cheek, "Magnificent Seven" premise, and by-the-numbers plotting. It just seems that the energy is flagging. There's only just enough here of the essentials that make Spenser indelible: the sarcastic, often self-deprecatory wit; his mouth-watering tastes in food and (especially, for me) beer; his image-confounding literacy; his sensitivity and tolerance; his undying love and lust for Susan Silverman; the toughness, the personal loyalty, the practically chivalrous code of ethics. I'm not sure it's such a brilliant reflection on Spenser that brief observations of his character issue from the mouths of other characters. Sure, we who've been following him all these years--witnessing his changes, turmoils, his growth--know the territory of his mind and soul. By now, to us he's like a dear friend. But now it seems he's tired of talking about himself--this, from a first-person storyteller?--and how he envisions the world, and it's not just from "world-weariness," either.

Then there's the "editing thing." This is a veteran writer and I presume a veteran editorial staff--so why so many typos? And how did a confusion about the passage of time from a certain event--a confrontation that happens both "yesterday" and "this afternoon" in succeeding chapters--ever get past the galley proofs? Who's paying attention? The last time I saw this kind of confusion was, I believe, in THE WIDENING GYRE, which seemed to exhibit a similar sort of listlessness. Are we coming to another trough after so many years of riding high?

I can understand Parker's quandary--thirty novels over thirty years featuring the same protagonist, unique and endearing as he is, is quite an achievement and undoubtedly taxing. How do you keep coming up with something new, something worth saying? Do you really want to, and why? How do you continue to satisfy fans--like me!--for whom Spenser novels are not an acquired taste, but an addiction?

Maybe we'll have to resolve ourselves to the thought that the end may be in sight. That's natural enough, and Parker seems to be nudging us toward the inevitable with a conversation in this book between Spenser and Susan that's ostensibly about the impending mortality of Pearl the Wonder Dog. "All good things must come to an end," the saying goes. If we're nearing the end, well, overall it's been a great ride. Thanks, Mr. Parker, your work has brought me many, many red-eyed, satisfied hours. If it's not quite the end yet, then I still hope for a return to the admittedly lofty standard of storytelling to which I've been so happily spoiled.

Rating:
Summary: Receives Joe Mantegna's excellent narrative style
Review: Robert B. Parker's Potshot receives Joe Mantegna's excellent narrative style, polished by his years in film, as it tells of a Boston investigator Spencer, who becomes involved with a lethal gang as he investigates the murder of a woman's husband. Unabridged, so none of the nuances are edited out.

Rating:
Summary: Great Read - Location is negative!
Review: POTSHOT was one of Parkers best reads in some time, however his location description was very poorly researched and totally unbelievable. The Sawtooth Range of Mountains is in Idaho and the desert description is in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico or California. The Arapaho Aquifer sounds like Wyoming or Montana. Maybe the locale was supposed to br confusing, but it sounded like a Bostonians view of the West without ever having been there.

Rating:
Summary: Good Spenser novel
Review: I won't bother explaining the plot, The two previous reviewers have done a good job of that. Rather I'd like to welcome Spenser back. He seemed to have gone missing in Hugger Mugger but now he's back, as smart-alecky and tough as ever. And there's more as Mr. Parker brings together a bunch of previous tough guys from Spenser's other novels. Tedy Sapp is here, along with Chollo, Bobby Horse, Vinnie, Bernard J. Fortunato, and of course, Hawk. The whole thing is great fun and almost reminds you of the Earps versus the Daltons. Not great literature perhaps, but a good fun read. I recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Potshot -- Classic Spenser... Again.
Review: If you're familiar with the Spenser series, I'll save you a ton of time and say, "Read _Potshot_, it's classic Parker and you won't be disappointed."

If you're not familiar, I'll write a bit more. The world Robert B. Parker created around the Boston detective Spenser (precursor to the 'Spenser for Hire' TV series) is simply complex. While the book can stand on it's own, _Potshot_ integrates characters from dozens of prior Spenser novel. Having spent time with these characters (and their motivations) in prior novels gives this book a richness that will escape first time readers.

In terms of plot, yes, this is a mystery novel, but the mystery is usually an afterthought to character development. The off-the-cuff discussions Spenser and his cohorts have over breakfast regarding guns are far more interesting than whodunit. If you're looking for complex plot, keep moving... Parker writes characters and he writes them well.